Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
The B Zero, a future great electric car
At the Paris Motor Show, the French industrial company Bolloré and the famous Italian car designer Pininfarina presented a car they will release next year, the B 0.
All electric and coming with brand new lithium polymer battery, the B0 (or B Zero) has a range of 250 kilometers (155 miles), a top speed of 130 kilometers per hour (80 mph).
Dubbed the best-looking small car by the Car Tech blog, this is typically the kind of car we would like to drive when the train, the bus or the bike can’t be used.
According to EcoGeek :
The four-seater, four-door hatchback has a 153-mile (246 kilometres) range and a top governed speed of 80 mph (129 kilometres per hour) and nifty looking solar panels build into the roof and hood.
Originally conceptualized in 2004 as a two-door model, the B0 today has added more doors and shrunken the battery size.
The B0’s secret weapon is its lithium polymer (LMP) battery, which is paired with an ultracapacitor. The latter stores energy and allows for regenerative braking and acceleration capabilities.
The battery can recharge in a few hours and, although not confirmed, early pricing reports place it around $23,000 – not including the price of leasing the lithium-ion battery packs.
Best of all, B0 is not a prototype but an actual production model. More will roll out of its Turin factory by the end of 2009.
For more information about this future marvel, please check out the Pininfarina website or download their brochure (in pdf format).
This reminds me of the C-Cactus [Fr], a hybrid prototype presented last year by the French car maker Citroen, equally good looking.
Related posts:
- Controlled Auto Ignition : the future of car engines
- Aerogel, the future of insulating materials
- Toyota and EDF to propose electric cars
- Better Place : an interesting project of hybrid cars
- A great video on why CFL are fantastic
|
Please subscribe to the RSS feeds ( What is RSS ? ) or by Email to receive the latest articles on your computer for free.
|
 |
If you liked this article, please share it with your favorite social bookmarking website : | Tweet | Share |
2 Comments
On October 19th, 2008
at 2:14 am
The things could be powered by pretty girl’s smiles, and they’d still be an abomination.
First, cars are deadly. Each year 1.2 million people die in car accidents, a quarter of them pedestrians – they don’t even drive the things, and still get killed by them. This compares with only 200,000 killed by war. Everything we do has a price, the question is, is it worth it? As I cruise along with the radio playing, is that comfort worth 1.2 million lives?
Second, once you decide to drag a tonne or two of metal and plastic around with you whenever you travel, it’s never going to be very energy-efficient.
Third, that tonne or two or metal and plastic is resources, and fossil fuels aren’t the only finite resources.
These first three problems become even worse when you consider that most of the world doesn’t own cars, but would like to.
Fourth, cars carry with them a whole host of other problems, such as bad city design with homes great distances from workplaces, vast residential suburbs with no services, the breakdown of community and so on.
Lastly, in a world of limited resources, the use of resources should be slanted more towards necessities than luxuries. The question arises, is a car a necessity or a luxury? Well, currently in the world there are about 800 million cars, and 6,700 million people. Across the developed West we find 0.5-1 cars per person, so we can fairly say that those 800 million cars are matched with at most 1,600 million people. So that over three-quarters of humanity somehow manages to get along in daily life without a car.This makes the car look rather more like a luxury than a necessity. Why can’t the rest of us get along with the things?
On October 19th, 2008
at 3:45 pm
I agree with you Kyle, this is exactly why I noted in my introduction ” this is typically the kind of car we would like to drive when the train, the bus or the bike can’t be used.
That’s what I do. I take the train and the bus or just walk as much as I can and take my car only if I can’t do otherwise.
I read somewhere that tomorrow, we won’t be the proprietors of the cars we drive, but just lending them.
This is an idea they have in Paris; they plan to rent cars the same way they rented bikes (cf. my article on the velib’)
Thanks for your comment, it is always a pleasure reading from you.